Make New Friends, But Keep the Old
Yesterday morning, I had breakfast with one of my neighbors from our Olive Street house. I have spoken of her before. She lived right next door to Bill and me for the entire time we lived there. Many years ago, we took down the fence that separated our two houses, fully intending to pay someone to build a new fence. Weeks went by, then months. Finally, we all decided it wasn’t necessary to have a fence at all. Both of our yards were nicely kept. Neither of us had dogs. She liked hearing and watching our grandkids play. Surprisingly, the new residents of our house haven’t mentioned the notion of building a fence. Maybe we started a new trend. It was nice to catch up on neighborhood news. I’m happy to be making new friends, but I really want to hold on to our hold friends as well.

Great Ball of Fire
After days and days of cold temperatures, intermittent snow, and gray skies, a great big yellow ball finally appeared in the sky Tuesday afternoon. The temperature yesterday was in the high 40s, and is supposed to reach almost 50 by the end of the week. Even better, sunshine is expected all week as well. For the past weeks, as people passed us in the hallway, there were comments like cold enough for ya. Tuesday afternoon, there was a nearly universal sigh of relief. Isn’t it so nice to see the sun is the comment we heard the most often in the hallways.

I’ve Seen the Light
One of the things that wasn’t included in our apartment was ceiling light fixtures. Yep. There are just bare bulbs on the ceilings of our living room and both bedrooms. In my own hillbilly way, it’s taken me four months to finally get around to purchasing some light fixtures from Wayfair. The light fixtures for the living room arrived yesterday, and the fixture for the guest room and the fan/light for our bedroom should arrive Saturday. The best news of all is that Bill doesn’t have to install them. A simple call to schedule someone from our maintenance service and we will have someone installing our fixtures shortly.

The Heat is On
I don’t know if this is a national problem, but the cost of energy in Colorado has skyrocketed. There’s probably a reason for this, but quite frankly, since our gas and electric costs are include in our set monthly fee, I have really paid attention to the news about the rising price of staying warm. The woman with whom I had breakfast told me that her December bill was 200-some. Her January bill was $550. Yoiks. Stay warm, everybody. But not too warm.

Ciao.